Chapter 4
FOUR
As strange as a hag and twice as mad.
The berries and the bread were gone when I woke.
Sleep had come late in the night, but no matter how fiercely I’d stared at the armoire, the faerie had not shown itself. It must have come out while I slept.
It was well past noon, and the world glowed with golden late-winter sun. Thick woodsmoke curled lazily into pristine skies. The air was warm with the scent of a hearty meal.
I felt almost as if burned by the brightness—raw, and aching for something I could not quite grasp.
Perhaps in my earliest memories, our cabin amid black firs had felt just as bright and alive.
A home, not just a husk of walls and a roof to protect us from the evil lurking outside.
I blamed this chamber for unearthing such forgotten memories.
The darkwood furnishings and the crisp, white sheets.
The nettle talismans fastened to doorframes, the mirror above the bed covered with a laced sheet to keep the spirits of the evil dead from slipping back into this world—
I pinched the knotted scar so viciously, an age-old pain flared beneath the skin—like the sting of a rusted blade.
As strange as a hag and twice as mad.
These rituals…
These oddities…
I could not stand to look at them. I could not bear to acknowledge their existence—neither in this chamber nor within my memories.
A bold knock rattled the smaller of the two doors. I suspected, with a bite of dread, that I knew who waited on its other side. Still, I asked, “Who’s there?”
We learned from the cradle always to ask, lest we mistakenly invite a faerie inside.
Even my father, with his liquor-dumbed mind, had remembered such customs: He’d taken the lordling’s coin through the cracked-open door before he shoved me over the threshold, and in all these summers he’d never once invited the lordling inside.
Adrik’s tone dripped with ill-concealed amusement as he said, “Just half of a wicked faerie.”
“Come in,” I said in a thin, irritated voice.
I loathed its timid sound. I’d never had much chance to exercise it. Not when I was little, for the villagers would not let their children near me, nor when I was older and bloodying my hands for the lordling, and not in recent times either. I’d accepted my lonesome fate.
Adrik, of course, had no such troubles. He swept with effortless grace inside, bowing to fit his golden-curled head through the door, and regaled me with a blinding smile. I shivered as his gaze twined with mine; moss-green vines pulling me in, choking me, tearing me open—
“Good afternoon,” he trilled. “You must be starving.”
I snapped, like a taut string cut loose, free from his gaze.
He was holding a platter, laden with a steaming bowl and a chalice of wildberry juice.
I eyed the meal cautiously. It was a thick, fragrant stew of pork, pearl onions, glazed carrots, and dried apricots in a sauce of red wine—a feast even the richest families in the Ravenwoods could afford only on the solstice.
There was a basket of bread as well, baked with herbs and cheese, and fruit preserves garnished with wildflowers.
“You need not look so suspicious. I am an excellent cook.”
I suspected this was his arrogance speaking, but I dared not challenge him.
He had, after all, saved me; and worse, he was half of a wicked faerie.
I was dead if I roused his ire or his suspicion.
I reached warily for the spoon, like a deer approaching a feeding hand.
Adrik was too cheerful and entirely too charming.
I knew men like him. I’d spent nights tangled in their sheets, gone before they awoke.
Behind their handsome faces, smirks and rich clothes lurked always an ugliness.
I took a small taste of the stew and forgot for a moment that I was not to fuel Adrik’s pride. It was the most delicious thing I’d ever tasted, flooding me with warmth. A soft, contented sound slipped from me. From the armoire came a high-pitched chortle.
I nearly dropped the spoon in fright. The doors rattled and creaked.
A knock came from within. Adrik went to investigate, unfazed.
He did not open the armoire, as I’d fearfully expected.
Perhaps he did not wish to disturb whatever horrid faerie lived within.
Instead, he took the broom that leaned in the furthest corner of the chamber and turned the dust-riddled thing upside down.
As strange as a hag and—
The clatter ceased.
I drew breath to calm the tremor of my hands. There lived no spirits in the hearth, none beneath the threshold, none in old armoires either. A coincidence. A trick of the mind, or that of a wicked half-faerie.
“Better leave a bite if you wish to sleep in peace,” Adrik said with a glance at the bowl I still clutched.
I said nothing as I ate the stew, careful not to let another sound of pleasure slip out.
“How cruel to keep me in suspense,” he said with a grin when my spoon scraped the bottom. “I’m still awaiting your verdict.”
The warm meal must have softened my heart, or perhaps he’d lulled me with a glamour. I said quietly and almost a little teasingly, “It is quite delectable.”
“Ah, such glowing praise.” How I loathed that self-satisfied smile. “Now, can I interest you in dessert?”
He drew a handknife from his gold-stitched sash. I shrieked as he twirled it between his long fingers. Terror froze me as I awaited the blade’s touch.
“Calm,” Adrik murmured, that haunting green of his gaze bright with alarm.
“I meant only to offer you a taste of my blood.” I could not tell whether he looked concerned or offended—neither boded well for me.
He said tersely, “I do not wish to be feared. I do not wish to be mistrusted. Do me this favor, please. A drop is all I ask.”
How strange that a faerie should be so eager to relinquish his power. How strange that he was the one to make this offer, and I the one to hesitate. If he wished to prove that I needed not mistrust him, his plan had gone awfully awry. I was now certain something foul was afoot.
Just half of a wicked faerie.
I would have much preferred a whole one—those were predictable. I did not know whether Adrik could lie, if he possessed glamour magic, or if doors kept him out at all.
Adrik sighed, gaze tangling with mine as he brought the knife lightly to his palm.
A slender line of crimson speckled with gold welled at the blade’s tip; proof that he possessed the blood of humans and faeries.
He held his fist wordlessly over the chalice and looked firmly at me as one, two, three drops trickled into the juice.
He brought the chalice to his mouth, licking a dark-red droplet from his lip.
“No poison,” he said with a hollow smile. “Please.”
I laughed humorlessly. His eagerness felt like a trap, but to deny his offer was madness. “I assume if you wanted me dead you’d have left me in the wastes.”
“Or skewered you with my sword.”
Or that. I was well aware that he could end me in the blink of an eye if he wished.
It was not death I feared. I braced myself as I took the chalice.
The taste of metal gathered harshly on my tongue, but there was no sickly sweetness of rotten things.
Just a slight tang of salt, like inhaling the mist of a sunlit tide.
“Thank you,” Adrik murmured and settled, to my utmost alarm, into the armchair. “I have a few questions for you.”
He must have noticed that I retreated. That I cowered in the corner of the bed like a wounded animal. His gaze turned sharp with interest. A hunter, realizing that he was in the presence of prey.
“I do not wish to pry,” he began. It was a lie. He wished to tear my secrets from my flesh— “These are dark times. Wildemire is glad to shelter you, but we must protect ourselves from the warring blood-tribes. We must know that you pose no threat to this town.”
I ignored the sting of guilt. I’d witnessed the waste the blood-wars had laid to the southern forests only from afar. The image of trees weeping crimson tears still haunted me. For a decade, the battles had waxed and waned and crept ever closer to the wasteland.
I forced myself to look at Adrik as I answered—not into his eyes, for I feared I’d get tangled again, but at the shadows under his sharp cheekbones.
“I was born and raised in Eldevale, but my mother’s family hails from the Ravenwoods.”
A simple, well-rehearsed answer.
I knew the mining town of Eldevale well enough to pretend I’d lived there.
I had, after all, spent nine lonely summers looking from my mountain shelter down at its red-tiled roofs, at the ice-blue lake at its heart.
My connection to the Ravenwoods was no secret.
I bore the features of my ancestors: black curls, cool olive skin, freckled cheeks, and thin, copper-brown eyes.
In truth, I had been born and raised in the Ravenwoods’ wildest, darkest corner.
Ten autumns ago, I’d travelled west to Kresting and then north to Eldevale.
No, I had fled.
Adrik studied me with too-watchful eyes. “A wicked place, the Ravenwoods.”
“A wicked place, indeed.”
“Have you been?”
“No.” I curled my hands into the sheets to conceal a tremor. "I have heard the stories and I never wish to go.”
“Ah,” Adrik said with slight amusement. “I too have a penchant for allowing stories to guide me.” He waited a moment, as if he expected I’d volunteer another tidbit to our conversation. When I made no such effort, he said, with a quick glance at my hands, “You are a miner?”
I might have felt offended by his insinuation, had my hands not worn a thick coat of callouses from a winter’s work on the fishdocks, from nine summers of scavenging Mount Windrest for food, and had not most of Eldevale’s populace indeed labored in its famous moonstone mines.
“I’m a bookseller with a fondness for the wild.”
Another carefully considered answer. I was well-read for an unschooled girl from the Ravenwoods.
My mother had seen to it that we spent any coin she could find in my father’s pockets, after he’d returned from the brewer, on books.
I’d often sought refuge from the twisted world outside within stories.
On Mount Windrest, once I’d bargained with the faeries for mushrooms and berries and the traps had yielded a hare for supper, I'd use the final scraps of daylight to draw and read.
I had an odd knack for finding abandoned books in hollow trunks and on beds of moss—or perhaps they had a habit of finding me.
“I wonder,” Adrik said, and I knew by the caution in his voice that he doubted me already, “what a bookseller from Eldevale hoped to find in the wasteland.”
“I was travelling to Eldevale from Kresting. I visited my great-aunt for the solstice.”
"There are other, less perilous roads to Eldevale."
“I was in a haste.”
“Ah yes, because your lover awaits.” Again that sliver of wariness, that mocking undertone. I’d lost him amid the lies, and I feared I possessed neither enough eloquence nor charm to ease his doubts. “Tell me about them.”
Heat curled through my veins and sprawled to my cheeks. I was not quick, not sharp enough to think of a tale. I’d not had a lover in my life who lasted longer than a night and I did not know how to lie of such unknown things as warm arms beckoning me home.
“You claimed you did not wish to pry.”
“An unwise claim, indeed,” he said with displeasure. “I should have waited to make such promises until I knew you better. Alas, you are unwilling to speak unless I pry—so pry I must.”
“I’ve answered all you asked of me.” Too shrill, that traitorous voice of mine. Too afraid. “Why must you know about my lover?”
Adrik's face darkened. “Because few lovers are worth the perils of the wasteland. I believe you were there for another reason. I believe you are hiding something.” With eyes sharp as a butcher’s knife he studied me—as if he wished to gut me and read my secrets in my entrails.
He was, after all, half of a wicked faerie.
“Were you not there too?” In my terror, I had forgotten to be clever and quiet. I should have known he’d not take well to being prodded in return.
He smiled viciously. “I was hunting.” A shiver crept over me.
I said nothing while I pinched, as covertly as I could, the knotted scar.
Deep within me, in a rotten hollow, stirred the darkness.
“I wonder—” Though he remained much too near, his voice came from across the chamber; muted and dull. “Were you hunting or were you running?”
The monster snapped awake. It hissed as it clawed a path from the darkness. A prickling ache began in my fingertips.
“Please,” I rasped. “I am a woman of few means and fewer connections. I did not ask to be brought here. I did not scheme for it either.”
“That is not enough.” His voice was dark and terrible. There was no trace left of the charming, good-humored man who’d come with home-cooked stew. “I need to know that I will not come to regret saving you. That you will not bring ruin upon all I hold dear.”
Hold dear… As if a faerie was capable of such things.
“Then cast me out into the storm. Let me go.” My voice trembled with anger and with fear and, above all, with shame.
My veins thickened darkly beneath paper-thin skin.
If he saw… If he saw, I was dead, or worse.
“I did not ask you to save me. You should have left me. You should have let me die. What you saved, I have long given up. This life has no worth to me. I owe you nothing.”
As strange as a hag and twice as mad.
As vile as the rot and better off dead.
I noted, through tear-blurred vision, that Adrik looked at me no longer.
His gaze clung to the window—where the evening sun drowned behind wooded hills and the shadows thickened between the trees.
I almost expected him to drag me from the warmth of the bed and banish me to the winter woods.
I would have welcomed it. I clenched my chattering teeth to contain the monster. It began to slip through the cracks.
“Nothing but death awaits in the forest,” Adrik said softly. “Alas, I am not cruel enough to let you go.”
He swept wordlessly into the dusk. The door still trembled long after the hiss of his furious steps had faded. Deep within, the monster writhed, shredding its cage. A crack—
Hello, little bird.
I splintered.